Lidl-Trek Confirm The 2026 Giro d'Italia Roster — Milan Targets A Third Maglia Ciclamino, Ciccone Switches To Mountain Stage-Hunter, Nys Locks Down The Mid-Week Hilly Stages
Wednesday afternoon Saxon. Lidl-Trek have published the eight-rider Giro d'Italia 2026 squad and the strategic shift is unmistakable: no GC card, three stage-targeting leaders, and the rest of the line-up explicitly built around them. Jonathan Milan, Giulio Ciccone, Thibau Nys, Derek Gee, Max Walscheid, Mattia Sobrero, Toms Skujiņš and Daan Hoole get the start. Mattias Skjelmose and Juan Ayuso are explicitly off the Giro list and will headline the Tour de France in July.
Milan is the press-call headline. The Italian, who took the maglia ciclamino in both 2023 and 2024 before switching to a Tour-only programme last May, returns to the Giro after a 2025 spring built around Tirreno-Adriatico and Milan-Sanremo. He arrives on the back of stage wins at Tirreno and the Tour of Catalunya, and the team's internal modelling has him on the strongest sprint form of any of the Giro's published fast men. The 2026 parcours is unusually generous to the sprinters — six stages projected for a bunch finish — and Milan is 4/9 with the major books to take the overall points classification.
Ciccone's role is the more interesting tactical pivot. The Italian, fourth at the 2023 Giro and the Tour de France's mountains classification holder, returns to his home Grand Tour after a winter rebuild around the Volta a Catalunya and the Tour of the Alps. Sport director Luca Guercilena was explicit at the press call that the Giro this year is "stage hunting only — Giulio knows the GC is for next year, this year we go for the maglia azzurra and three stages." The Stage 16 Mortirolo, Stage 19 Finestre, and Stage 20 Sestriere are the explicit targets — the trio of stages on which Ciccone has historically performed best.
Thibau Nys lines up on a similar mid-week breakaway brief. The Belgian, who won Stage 4 of the 2024 Giro on the punchy summit at Bocca della Selva, gets a free role across Stages 4, 5, 7, 11 and 14 — every stage that the team's race-modelling team has classified as lumpy enough to drop the pure sprinters but not so hard as to let the GC group dictate the finish. Nys's late-spring form has been consistent — fourth at the Amstel Gold Race, sixth at the Flèche Wallonne — and the maglia azzurra is rated as a realistic secondary objective.
Derek Gee provides Ciccone with his climbing co-pilot. The Canadian, who memorably finished second on five separate Giro stages on his 2023 debut, is now the senior climbing domestique and gets the unglamorous job of pacing the late-mountain pulls. Skujiņš and Hoole are the engine on the long flat stages — Hoole the dedicated final-3km lead-out man for Milan, Skujiņš the road-captain on the medium-mountain stages where the team will fight to keep Milan in the gruppetto for points-classification protection.
Max Walscheid and Mattia Sobrero round out the eight. Walscheid is the long-pull deluxe, the 6'8" German who can drag the peloton up false-flat finales; Sobrero is the team's Italian time-trial reference and goes especially well on the technical Stage 21 Verona course where his 2022 fourth place was the team's best of the entire Giro. Sobrero is also a serious bid for a stage on the 41.6km Stage 10 Cesena ITT.
The Lidl-Trek announcement formally closes the WorldTour Giro roster picture. With Visma-Lease a Bike publishing their Vingegaard-led eight in the morning and UAE Team Emirates-XRG earlier this week, the 2026 startlist is now complete with the wildcards still to confirm. Milan is 5/2 outright for the points classification — the shortest pre-Giro green-jersey price the bookmakers have set since 2018 — and Ciccone is 6/1 for the mountains classification.
Both Milan and Ciccone fly to Bulgaria on Friday afternoon for the Stage 1 reconnaissance, with the team's lead-out train scheduled for a final on-road lead-out drill on the Stage 1 Sofia finishing straight on Saturday morning. The maglia rosa, opening sprint, and opening wave of GC-level battles are then in play from Sunday.